GPS Gets You There Without Being Here

The incorporation of new technology into our lives is always a mixed blessing. Though the net gains are obvious and much heralded, the net losses are insidious and often in some way debilitating.

The introduction of Global Positioning Systems into our everyday lives is an excellent example, one I learned earlier this summer during our annual trip to the Thorson family reunion in Bemidji, Minn. On these trips, my wife drives while I navigate, usually with a short stack of large-format, high-resolution maps for Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, Ontario, Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota. This year, however, I left the five pounds of paper behind in favor of the GPS system factory installed on my iPhone, which I was given last Christmas.

Initially, I was delighted with the blinking blue dot that tracked our position along the road as we moved. Having spent much of my life using professional surveying tools for my work, the idea that my earthly position could be instantly triangulated by a set of cellphone towers and satellites was almost miraculous. I was compulsively entranced. Temporarily addicted, is what my wife said.

Eventually, the novelty wore off and I literally came to my senses, rolling down the window, feeling the gusts of wind, inhaling the moist air, craning my neck to all points of the compass, scrutinizing the ditch daisies and sensing the trajectory of my body in three-dimensional space. Appreciating where I was involved so much more than the calculated position of a blue dot showing my instantaneous plot latitude and longitude. Rather, it was a multisensory cognitive experience that will never come again.

Imagine you're in the clubhouse after playing 18 holes of golf. On your scorecard is the map of the course. Thinking back to each stroke, you mark the location where your ball came to rest. Then you connect the dots. This is the grand total of what your GPS system would have given you: the spatial coordinates of the ball at each point.

Now conjure up the personal totality of each dot, the lie of the ball, your location plus the surface roughness, local slope, clearance for the backswing, potential hazards and obstacles, the wind, and even the dirt on your ball. Each place was infused with sensation and cognition, whether for good or bad. Each was real, rather than virtual.

And now to the beach. You park, walk out and claim your spot in the clean sand. You plant your folding chair and settle in. Though your GPS location remains fixed, your geography is dynamic. Waves migrate with the tide. The sun moves across the sky. Couples parade. Clouds drift. Crowds thicken and thin. Your sense of place is far more complex than your blinking blue dot might convey.

Sadly, I know someone who's let their GPS system preclude knowledge of where they've been when traveling. On every trip, she relies exclusively on the talking voice, which tells her when to turn and what's next. North and south are irrelevant. Views are unmapped. Roads are roads. She travels as if in a capsule being shuttled between the bubbles of home, work, restaurant, school and store. When I ask her what route she took, she doesn't know because she just turned when told. What psychological poverty it must be to not know where you've been!

More sadly, there are those for whom the bubbles of actual reality (sensory and cognitive) are disappearing due to Internet addiction. They spend their lives in the digital cloud of social networks, online shopping, game playing, data streaming, blog reading, etc. — forgetting what actual clouds look like. For these poor souls, GPS systems are just part of their featureless lives, as Gertrude Stein so famously quipped, "there is no there there."

Portable GPS systems are now standard fixtures of our material culture. Our task is to realize and appreciate their benefits without losing a sense of place. No longer is it enough to take the time to smell the roses. Now we must take the time to sense where we really are.